


Take Them to Church

by cruelmagic



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 13:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1943691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruelmagic/pseuds/cruelmagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He dreams and in his dreams everything is quiet, very quiet and still, and the silence rings in his ears louder and louder, until the universe is only the sound of emptiness (the abyss says hello and finally Tony doesn’t have a word to utter in response; he’s tiny and inconsequential).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Them to Church

**Author's Note:**

> Tony after the Avengers, throughout Iron Man 3.

He dreams about falling.

Vastness swallows him, darkness covers him like molasses, viscous yet tasteless, it fills his mouth and nostrils until he chokes and gasps for breath. Radiant starlight incinerates his eyes but in the blindness of brightness he sees more than he’s ever wished for, and he melts like wax, like honey too close to the sun, his wings broken, his wings crumbling, his suit disintegrating around him, and he plummets from the sky down—down—down, but darkness never leaves, it follows him like a second shadow. He cannot see it but he knows it’s there—they are out there and they will be coming back. Maybe not today, not tomorrow, but this plague, this threat is imminent, and he is unprepared. Too human and broken like a toy. Is he even a real superhero? Or just a fool in a metal can?

He’s always appreciated metaphors, he’s savoured the taste of words in his mouth, on his tongue, his lips, and found comfort in the walls they’ve build around him. What was it? A phoenix, he thinks just before his heart starts pounding and blood is flowing quicker through his veins. Oh, they’ve crashed the little bird, smashed him and the purifying fire never came (maybe he just needs the world to burn? No, it was Loki, the god of chaos, the god of vengeance and daddy issues, yet somehow it’s nothing unfamiliar to Earth, Loki’s taste for power and control. The alien invasion was new, though). His life has become a metaphor, a marvellous metaphor but a literary device cannot stop gods nor aliens.

(He doesn’t relish being Icarus, he resents the ending, and it makes Howard Dedalus—the great builder and Tony’s forever bound to repeat the fall—fall—fall).

***

He dreams and in his dreams everything is quiet, very quiet and still, and the silence rings in his ears louder and louder, until the universe is only the sound of emptiness (the abyss says hello and finally Tony doesn’t have a word to utter in response; he’s tiny and inconsequential). How? How do you fight the whole of the ever-expanding universe and prevail?

The worlds beyond haunt him, so alien, so malicious, so incomprehensible. And he’s so insignificant in comparison, his problems trivial for the indifferent universe. Words fail him, he detests them for that, they flee before he can catch them and express—describe—expound on what he witnessed: the marvellous and terrifying, the end of all things, annihilation of the humankind, and a new beginning born in cruelty and blood, and bones, and ruins. In his dreams his legacy turns into ashes and cinders and smoke; a desolate land in a matter of seconds. He blinks and the world is a graveyard (there’s something immensely callous in the saying in the blink of an eye, you can’t control it and it always happens when you can’t see it. He wouldn’t even have time to put on the suit; it’d become obsolete).

***

He goes downstairs and builds and builds and builds, better, faster, stronger suits, but it’s never enough. He wishes he could encase the whole world in a suit to make it safe (funny how once his biggest concern were the people and their never-ending wars and aggravating bickering). But the world won’t let him and won’t listen to him because the world knows how to adapt and move on. He can’t do that, he can’t just forget, not yet.

He builds more suits. MARK 20, MARK 21, MARK 22—

JARVIS counts the hours, the long hours of alertness, hectic work on the newest iteration of the suit. “Tinkering,” Tony says, “just tinkering,” but it’s never just that; he ignores his trembling hands, puts it on insomnia, it will go away, he says but even JARVIS knows it’s not true. Tony wears the suit and trembling stops, or at least he can’t see it anymore.

He’s in the cave once more, the cave at the end of the world, at the end of civilization, where both demons and wonders are born. He left himself there; the old Tony sits in the room, entrapped, not because of life threatening captivity, no, it’s because Tony, Tony Stark the Iron Man, does not need it anymore, his old self, an ugly caterpillar of a man yet to come, still unfinished. He finds himself there and reaches for him in a moment of weakness but then the dream collapses on itself, breaks like a jigsaw puzzle and scatters underneath him, because it always comes down to this, to this very moment when the world got bigger, too big for him and his suit, his metal can. He’d reached into the outer space on a nuclear bomb, and he fell. Truth be told, he never stopped falling.

He wraps himself in the suit like in a blanket (like a kid, the blanket goes over his head so the monsters won’t see nor come after him), tighter and tighter until the trembling stops and it’s easier to catch a breath.

MARK 31, MARK 32—

He’s afraid he won’t catch Pepper in time, her hand just outside his reach yet their fingers still brush against each other for the last time—a cruel joke of a godless universe. Her descent is infinite and he relives it again and again forgetting her touch, her smile, her voice, even though she’s right there.

“Tony, you have to stop—“ but she doesn’t finish and swallows the words, biting her lower lip. Her hands hold steady; she’s the only constant in his life, the only one that connects him with his older self, the one who witnessed his transformation.

She had his heart in her hands and she kept it while anyone else would either use it (Obadiah) or destroy it (Tony). She’s the only one he can trust. The only one he can’t live without. (He never talks about that cave, he never told her how her voice had kept him alive).

MARK 35, MARK 36—

He meets with Rhodey in bars and they eat greasy hamburgers and French fries with ketchup, kids cheer and give him their drawings—he’s a hero, he saved them all, he just can’t save himself anymore. Ironic, isn’t it? (he hates that word, it leaves a bad taste in his mouth; he needs more coffee to rinse it out (alcohol doesn’t help anymore; it did when he was dying, but now he has to live. Somehow)).

MARK 37—

He calls her just to hear her voice. “I’m busy, Tony,” she says but never hangs up, and adds quieter: “I’m not going anywhere, you know”. He knows, but he still frets this phone call, every-damn-time. What if— What if he could never have that last conversation, that last kiss, that last smile.

MARK 40, MARK 41—

He should become his suit; his suit should become him. And so MARK 42 is born, and Tony dances because he did it, he did it, he did it, but—

(Why is there always a but?)

His hands still tremble.

***

The suit crashes and opens like a deadly wound bleeding it’s hot-rod bright redness on the snow in Tennessee. Tony emerges bare (he doesn’t remember the world ever being so cold) and when he looks around, he sees a carcass: metallic bones protruding into the darkness and coldness of the night sky, steel flesh that embraced him so diligently for years is stripped and wires like nerves are exposed and naked (a nightmare). The suit has kept him safe, kept him whole when he’d felt like falling apart, kept him alive at the bottom of the ocean and in the vacuum underneath the alien worlds in the vicinity of lethal burning stars, with the aliens’ blood on its golden mask. He can barely breathe, his hands are trembling (it’s the cold, of course it’s the cold) and his knees are weak when he stands up. He drags the suit behind him, the only thing in his possession, useless and lifeless; it feels like dragging a corpse.

Yinsen called him once a man who had everything and nothing. But he managed to escape and change it; he replaced the bits he’d left behind and filled them with meaning and purpose. Filled them with invention, with Iron Man, with Pepper. And so the Mandarin tried to take everything away, he almost did. MARK 42 is the only suit left now with the Iron Legion buried underneath the ruins of his house (he needs JARVIS, oh buddy, where are you, don’t leave me alone).

(The thing is he was never good with presents: neither receiving nor giving them; you have to react somehow but what can you give a kid who has everything but his parents attention—whatever it is, it’s not good enough, so it should be big, robust, expensive, impersonal. The kid in him regarded the rabbit as the best gift there is but Pepper is not a kid, he misses her so much.

He never had to apologise before her but he finally understands why these words are so important for others, for her.

He never told Pepper her voice kept him alive, kept him sane when they tortured him in that cave at the end of the world.

She still has that blue dress, he thinks).

***

They don’t even know who he is without the suit on.

“Tony.”

“The mechanic.”

(What if he loses it all? If he doesn’t have the suit? How is he supposed to protect her then?)

And those words echo in his mind, and return to him even stronger and louder, and then he understands and sees clearly like he did in that cave when he’d built himself a cocoon, he can leave it now, he can emerge anew, a new being entirely; you can try to take everything away from him, but you cannot take away who he is.

A builder. A creator. A mechanic.

He can stop falling.

***

He’s forgotten that his biggest enemy was always the very system that’d created him.

The Mandarin is a sham, how fitting for the new world, an imaginary war on terror and money mammoths behind it. Miami, right here, in America, the biggest threat comes now from the inside, from corporations and their never-ending greed, where people are turned into numbers and numbers into profit; it always comes down to his original sin and Obadiah. Truth be told, Tone is not a hero because of his upstanding morals, America has its captain for it; no, Tony is a broken hero with as many flaws as anybody, he’s hero because he knows this world, he grew up in a new era that allowed him to use, to abuse all of the resources and finally he understands. Tony is a hero because somebody has to and this is the only way you can fight in the world of tomorrow, trying to sieve through the biggest bad guys, and the contemporary bad guys live on Wall Street, have white teeth and expensive lawyers on speed-dial. Tony is like them, he used to be like them, he speaks in the language of dollars and shares and bonds and stocks and investments. In other circumstances, he’d be Maya Hansen and all her alikes, fighting for funding, desperately needing a couple of millions more just to come up with a solution to a noble idea, for it to be taken away and weaponised, turned into profits. He never knew poverty, he never knew the meaning of struggle. He created the suit only when he was stripped down from everything, when surviving to the next day was placed under a question mark. He built MARK 2 when he moved from thinking about today to worrying about tomorrow. He allowed himself to be happy only when his own future was no longer threaten by palladium. The suit is not supposed to be his legacy, no—his legacy is supposed to be the world peace (he sounds like a beauty pageant queen, doesn’t he?). Yinsen, a man who’d had everything and lost everything, he gave him, a spoiled womanising alcoholic brat, a purpose, he gave his life meaning. He was a man with everything yet nothing, and when he came back from hell, through fires of the desert, he’s rebuilt their creation; Mark 1 had Yinsen’s blood on its metal hands, but MARK 2 was his creation as well.

Hope fills him when he saves them flying in the air because, finally, a broken man who put himself together, saves them all against the odds, against JARVIS’s calculations. If he could save them, he can save Pepper; he had only one suit, now—he has Iron Legion.

***

He didn’t—

He couldn’t—

He didn’t catch her—

Killian took her away.

His suits are just machines, expandable when no longer needed, he goes through them one by one and doesn’t blink while ordering JARVIS to blow MARK 42 up. He doesn’t need it anymore, he can build more, he is Iron Man after all and Killian won’t even have time to regret underestimating him.

Bu he falls and Extremis wins. It’s full of fire and ashes, and embers like the sun and Earth fused together (how can he fight that and prevail? The abyss opens its mouth to swallow him—).

And the Pepper saves him again. Every time he thinks he’s lost her, she comes back to hold him in her arms.

He blows them all up, for her, but when he hears explosions, he’s relieved. It’s easier to breathe with Pepper in his arms, easier to think without Iron Legion. He realises, they were too weak—prototypes of what’s yet to come.

***

Our brain mimics the universe, vast yet filled with possibilities. In the centre of it, there’s a black hole waiting—waiting for him. He will harness its potential—he will fill up all the emptiness inside him (he’s no longer a phoenix, he has no use for hollow bones), he will upgrade himself, and when times comes and he has to face the abyss, he will be ready.

He has plenty to say.


End file.
